Early Life
Lehrer was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and began studying classical piano music at the age of seven. He was more interested in the popular music of the age, however. Eventually, his mother also sent him to a popular-music piano teacher. At this early age, he began writing his own show tunes, which eventually helped him in his future adventures as a satirical composer and writer in his years of lecturing at Harvard University, and later at other universities.
Lehrer graduated from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, NY. He attended Camp Androscoggin, both as a camper and a counselor. While studying mathematics as an undergraduate student at Harvard College, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends, including "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" (1945). Those songs were later named The Physical Revue, a joking reference to a leading scientific journal, The Physical Review.
Read more about this topic: Tom Lehrer
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Three early risings make an extra day.”
—Chinese proverb.
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)